A Memory Called Empire

by Arkady Martine

  “She does,” Twelve Azalea added. “It’s infuriating, occasionally. ‘Likes aliens’ or not, Reed is really quite a conservative at heart.”

  “Goodnight, Petal,” Three Seagrass said, sharp, and Mahit was not proud of how grateful she was to know she wasn’t the only person rattled.

  * * *

  The message-box had filled up with infofiche sticks again by the time Three Seagrass had led Mahit back to her quarters. Mahit looked at them with a dull and inevitable sense of despair.

  “In the morning,” she said. “I’m going to sleep.”

  “Just this one,” Three Seagrass said. She held up an ivory stick set with a golden seal. It was probably real ivory, from some butchered large animal. Sometime earlier Mahit might have been offended, or intrigued, or both. Now she waved a hand at it: If you must. Three Seagrass snapped it open and it spilled its holographs in pale gold light all over her hands, reflecting off the cream and red and orange of her suit.

  “Her Excellency the ezuazuacat wants to meet with you at your earliest convenience.”

  Of course she did. (Of course she’d have an infofiche stick made out of an animal.) She was suspicious and smart and she knew Yskandr, and she’d been prevented from getting what she wanted in the morgue, so she’d try to get it another way.

  “Do I have a choice?” Mahit asked. “No, don’t answer that. Tell her yes.”

  * * *

  Yskandr’s bed smelled like nothing, or like Teixcalaanli soap, an empty smell with just the suggestion of mineral water. It was wide and had too many blankets. Curled up in it, Mahit felt as if she was a collapsing point at the center of the universe, sinking in on herself in recursions. She didn’t know what language she was thinking in. The starfield art above the bed glimmered in the dark—it was gauche—and she missed Yskandr, and she wanted to be angry with someone who would understand how she was angry—and the Jewel of the World made the small settling noises of any city around her outside the window—

  Sleep hit her like a gravity well, and she gave in.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  In-City cuisine is as varied as a visitor to any planet might expect: the City, despite being urbanized to nearly 65 percent of land area, has as many climates as any other planet, and there is excellent cold-weather food (this author kindly recommends the thin-sliced loin of small-elk, wrapped around winter vegetables, at Lost Garden in Plaza North Four—if you’re willing to make the trip!). Nevertheless classic in-City food is the food of the palace complex: subtropical, focused on the vast variety of flowers and pool-grown plants which are characteristic of the palace’s famous architecture. Begin your day with fried lily blossoms, their petals cupping fresh goat-milk cheese—almost every street vendor sells these and they’re better hot—before heading out on a culinary tour of Plaza Central Nine’s many interplanetarily celebrated restaurants …

  —from Gustatory Delights of the City: A Guide for the Tourist In Search of Exquisite Experiences by Twenty-Four Rose, distributed mostly throughout the Western Arc systems

  * * *

  […] anticipate the ability to authorize up to five hundred nonreplacement births in the next five years, due to the greater efficiency of the zero-gravity rice crop in its newest iteration. Births should be accounted first to individuals who have been on the registered-genetic-heritage list for more than ten years; then to the Councilor for the Miners, in anticipation of producing children likely to score highly on aptitudes for mining and engineering-line imagos …

  —statement by the Councilor for Hydroponics on “Strategic Life-Support Reserves and Anticipated Population Growth,” excerpt

  YSKANDR was not back in the morning.

  Mahit woke as empty-minded as she’d fallen asleep. She felt cavernous and echoing, a glassy fragility that was like the very beginning stages of a hangover. She put her hands out in front of her, held them flat. They didn’t shake. She tapped her fingertips against her thumb in alternating rhythmic patterns: it was as easy as it ever had been. If she had neurological damage—if her imago-machine had fucked up irrevocably and burnt out the neural pathways that were supposed to have inscribed Yskandr permanently into her, made them one individual out of two—it wasn’t showing up on the kind of basic workup she could do for herself. She bet she could walk toe-to-heel on a painted line, too. Not that it helped.

  On Lsel, now would have been past time to go see her integration therapist and be very distressed. This sort of thing—the cascading failure in the morgue, the blackouts and emotion-spikes and then silence—she had never heard of an imago integration going wrong like hers was going wrong. On Lsel she would have checked herself in to the medical decks. Now she was sitting on Yskandr’s bed in the center of Teixcalaan and being infuriated that he wasn’t here with her, instead. And if she was suffering neurological failure it didn’t seem to be having effects that a Teixcalaanli medical professional would notice, even if she wanted to see one.

  Yskandr’s bedroom had narrow, tall windows, three of them in a row, and the dawn sunlight came in in floodlight beams. There were tiny floating motes in them, dancing weightlessly—perhaps she was having neurological symptoms, or some kind of ocular migraine.

  She got up, walked over (heel-toe, just to see) and swept her hand through them. Dust. Dust motes. No air scrubbers in the Jewel of the World. There was a sky, too, and plants. Just like other planets she had been on, those brief visits. She was being ridiculous. It was only that everything was strange and she was so alone that was making her have these flights of paranoid fantasy.

  Three months wasn’t enough time for anyone to integrate properly. She and Yskandr were supposed to have had a year, a period to grow into each other, for her to absorb everything he knew and for him to dissolve from a voice in her mind to an instinctive second opinion. There were meditation practices and therapy sessions and medical checks and she had none of that here in the place she’d always wanted to be most.

  Yskandr, she thought. Your precursor has gotten you and me and the whole Station in more trouble than any of us strictly deserve, and you’d enjoy it, you’d love this whole mess, so where the fuck are you?

  Nothing.

  Mahit slammed the heel of her hand into the wall between two of the windows, hard enough to hurt.

  “Are you quite all right?” Three Seagrass inquired.

  Mahit spun around. Three Seagrass, already impeccably dressed as if she’d never removed her suit in the intervening night, leaned against the doorframe.

  “How wide is the Teixcalaanli concept of ‘you’?” Mahit asked her, rubbing her hand where she’d hit it. She’d probably bruised herself.

  “Grammatically or existentially?” Three Seagrass asked. “Get dressed, Ambassador, we have so many meetings today. I’ve found you Fifteen Engine—your predecessor’s former liaison—and pinned him down for a late breakfast in the Central City. And you would not believe the things that Information has in his file. If you want to make him nervous, ask him about his ‘charitable donations’ to humanitarian organizations which have been implicated in supporting that nasty little insurrection out in Odile.”

  “Do you sleep?” Mahit asked dryly. “Grammatically or existentially, as you prefer.”

  “Occasionally, on both counts,” Three Seagrass said, and vanished into the outer suite as swiftly as she’d arrived, leaving Mahit to think about what little she knew of Odile—there was some kind of petty rebellion there, but it had been kept quiet on the versions of Teixcalaanli newsfeeds which arrived on Lsel, as such things tended to be. Odile was on the Western Arc—one of the last systems annexed by Teixcalaan, at the beginning of Six Direction’s reign, when he’d been a military emperor first and foremost, a starship captain. Why there would be an insurrection there, Mahit wasn’t sure. But if she could pressure Fifteen Engine with having bad politics, she might have an advantage—if she needed one.

  Three Seagrass was rather determined to be useful, wasn’t she.

  Mahit
dressed in her most neutral Stationer greys, trousers and blouse and short jacket that would only be out of place in the City by virtue of not being Teixcalaanli, which was to say, incredibly conspicuous but not overt about it, and spent the whole time wondering if she’d live long enough to get imperial-style clothes made. In the outer room of the suite, she discovered that Three Seagrass had come up with bowls of some sort of creamy yellow porridge.

  “Not poisonous, promise,” she said, sucking a mouthful off a spoon. “The paste is processed for sixteen hours.”

  Mahit accepted a bowl with only mild trepidation. “I am convinced you aren’t deliberately trying to get me killed, if only for reasons of your vainglorious personal ambition,” she said. Three Seagrass made an undignified noise through her nose. “What would happen if the paste wasn’t processed?”

  “Cyanide,” Three Seagrass said cheerfully. “Natural antinutritional factor in the tubers. But delicious. Try yours.”

  Mahit did. There wasn’t much point to refusing. There was nothing safe; there were only gradations of exposure to danger. She felt deliriously unmoored, and that was before any cyanide exposure. The porridge was faintly bitter, rich and delicious. She licked the last of it off the back of her spoon when she was done.

  * * *

  They took the subway out of the palace complex. Three Seagrass led Mahit down four levels and across a plaza swirling with lower-level functionaries in pale cream with no red patrician shading on their suits—tlaxlauim, Three Seagrass explained, accountants, they travel in swarms—before descending into the station she claimed would take them out of the palace complex and into the City itself. Someone had plastered the walls of the subway entrance with what looked to Mahit like political posters: the Teixcalaanli battle flag, a fan of spears against a starry backdrop, rendered in lurid red and with its spears turned into part of a graffiti-style glyph that Mahit had to peer at to decipher. It might have been the word for “rot,” but she wasn’t sure. “Rot” had fewer lines than six.

  “Those’ll be taken down by the time we get back,” Three Seagrass said, plucking at Mahit’s sleeve to redirect her down the stairs. “Someone will call for maintenance. Again.”

  “Not your favorite … political party?” Mahit guessed.

  “I,” said Three Seagrass, “am an impartial observer from the Ministry of Information, and have no opinions at all about the sort of people who like putting up anti-imperial propaganda posters in public spaces and then don’t bother to participate in local government or apply to take the examinations and join the civil service.”

  “Is there a lot of that going around?”

  “There’s always a lot of that going around; it’s only the posters that change,” said Three Seagrass. “These ones aren’t holographic, which is sort of a pleasant difference—not walking through them.” At the bottom of the staircase was a sleek train platform, its walls decorated—where there weren’t more posters—with mosaic-tile images of roses in a hundred colors, shading white to gold to shocking pink.

  “This is Palace-East Station,” Three Seagrass explained. “There are six stations in the palace complex—six for the cardinal points of the compass, except flat.” She gestured at the subway’s map, where the palace complex appeared as a six-pointed star. “It’s more symbolic than practical, considering that you get off at Palace-Earth for the imperial apartments and cosmology says it ought to be Palace-Sky.”

  “What’s at Palace-Sky?” Mahit asked. The train carriage, when it came, was as spartan and clean-lined as the spaceport had been, full of Teixcalaanlitzlim in white. Most of them looked like the Teixcalaanlitzlim in paintings and photographs—brown and short with wide cheekbones and broad chests—but there were people from all sorts of ethnic backgrounds, all kinds of planetary systems. She even thought she’d spotted a freefall mutant, all long limbs and codominant pallor and red hair and exoskeleton to hold him upright under gravity. But all of the subway riders were dressed the same, save for the colors on their cream sleeves that indicated what branch of the civil service they belonged to. All employees of the palace, of the City. All Teixcalaanli, more so than she’d ever be, no matter how much poetry she memorized. She held on to a metal pole as the train began to move, at first hurtling through a dark tunnel and then emerging into the open air of an elevated track. The City swept by through the windows, buildings blurring.

  “Archives, the Ministry of War, and the Imperial Censor Office,” said Three Seagrass, answering her earlier question.

  “That’s not wrong, cosmologically.”

  “What an opinion you have of what we send out into the universe,” Three Seagrass said.

  “Literature, conquest, and things that are forbidden. Isn’t that accurate?”

  The doors hissed open; half the Teixcalaanlitzlim exited. The ones who got on in their place were more colorfully dressed; some were children. The smallest children stared at Mahit unabashed, and their minders—parents or clonesibs or crèche caretakers, it was hard to tell—did little to redirect their attention. They all stood well back from Mahit and Three Seagrass, despite the crowdedness of the carriage, and Mahit wondered about touch-taboo, about xenophobia. When Yskandr had been here—when imago-Yskandr had been here, so, fifteen years ago—there hadn’t been obvious avoidance of physical interaction with foreigners, and it wasn’t in any of the cultural context she knew for Teixcalaan.

  Changes in comfort levels with strangers were indicative of insecurity; she knew that from the very basic training in psychological response that all Lsel citizens had as part of their aptitude testing. Something had changed in the City, and she didn’t know what.

  “We took the Palace-East line and we’re headed to Plaza Central Nine,” Three Seagrass said, shrugging, as if that was an answer to what Mahit had asked, and pointed out the interlocking subterranean lines on the carriage’s wall map. The subway laced through the City like ice crystals on a pane of glass: a fractal merging of multiple lines, an impossible complexity. And yet the Teixcalaanlitzlim used it with impunity and ease; there had been a precisely calibrated countdown clock on the platform, saying when their train would arrive, and that countdown clock had been correct.

  * * *

  Plaza Central Nine had more people than Mahit had ever seen in one place. Every time she thought she understood the scale of the Jewel of the World she realized she was wrong. There were no points of useful comparison with Lsel. Lsel—the largest of the ten stations—could support at most thirty thousand lives. There were a quarter that many Teixcalaanlitzlim moving through this singular plaza, uncontrolled, unguided by corridor-lines or shifting gravitational field strength, going wherever they wished. If there was an organizing principle to their movement it was something out of fluid dynamics, which had never been Mahit’s area of educational expertise.

  Three Seagrass was an exemplary guide. She hovered at Mahit’s left elbow, close enough that no curious Teixcalaanli could take it into their heads to approach the barbarian foreigner with inopportune questions, but far enough to preserve a modicum of Mahit’s personal space. She pointed out architectural features and points of historical interest, falling automatically into polysyllabic couplets when she wasn’t paying enough attention not to. Mahit envied her that effortless fluidity of referents.

  In the center of the plaza the bright steel and gold and glass of the buildings peeled outward like the petals of a flower, revealing a burst of bright blue atmospheric sky. Mahit made Three Seagrass pause in the direct center so she could tilt her whole upper spine back and look at it. The vault of it, dizzying—endless—it seemed to spin. She was the center of the world and—

  —her hand bleeding bright red into the gold sun of the ritual bowl (his, not her, Yskandr’s hand), the sky shaped like this, a vault glimmering with so many stars as he looked up at it through the petal-explosion roof of a sun temple, and through the sting and the dizzy whirl of the sky he said, “We’re sworn to a purpose, now, you and I—your blood and mine—”
>
  Mahit blinked, hard, and the flash was gone. Her spine hurt from the bending, so she straightened up. Three Seagrass was smiling at her.

  “You’re sunstruck,” she said.

  (imago-struck)

  “I ought to take you to a temple and have a divine throw gold and blood at you. Haven’t you ever been on a planet?”

  Mahit swallowed. Her throat was dry, and she could still smell the coppery blood from ago, a scent afterimage. “The sky was never this color on any planet I’ve visited,” she managed. “Don’t we have a meeting to get to? Side trips to religious officials will surely make us late.”

  Three Seagrass shrugged expressively. “The sun temples aren’t going anywhere. There are litanies at every hour. More, if you’re going out-of-City or joining the military, and you want to shore up your luck and earn the favor of the stars. But the restaurant’s just over there, if you can bear to stop standing in the exact middle of Central Nine.” She pointed, straight-armed.

  The restaurant in question was open and bright, with shallow bowls of water glistening with floating many-petaled pale blue flowers set as centerpieces on each white-stone tabletop. Mahit found it terribly ostentatious, and suspected that Three Seagrass didn’t realize that that much wasted water was even something to remark on.

  Fifteen Engine was waiting for them at a corner table. He was middle-aged, broad shoulders over a high barrel of a stomach, steel-grey hair combed back from an aristocratically low hairline and tied in a tail bound with a metal ring. His cloudhook was exactly as she’d remembered it—as Yskandr had remembered it—an oversized bronze structure that ate up his left eye socket, cheekbone to browbone. She felt an echo of the flash of emotional intensity she’d gotten off of just Three Seagrass saying his name: distant fondness, distant frustration. But shadowed, half remembered. Perhaps she hadn’t felt them at all. Ghost memory, not the imago giving her anything useful.